Who Goes There?

For readers of a certain generation, Robert Heinlein’s juveniles got them into science fiction at an early age; for others (and indeed the two are by no means mutually exclusive), it was Andre Norton. Born Alice Mary Norton, she had her name changed legally to Andre Alice Norton when she started to write in the ’30s, although she didn’t make her SFF debut until 1947. She also sometimes wrote under the pseudonym “Andrew North.” With a career that spans more than half a century, Norton was incredibly prolific, with her Witch World series alone probably taking up a whole shelf or two. Along with the likes of Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson she made an impression writing both science fiction and fantasy.

I’ll be the first to admit I have not yet read any of Norton’s novels, and have only read a few of her short stories. Funnily enough, for how much she wrote overall, Norton wrote comparitively little short fiction, and even less of it appeared in the magazines. “Mousetrap” is a very short Martian odyssey from Norton, so fittingly I won’t be keeping you long with this review. It’s one of those vignettes that carries a nasty little sting in its tail. It’s also the kind of soft SF that easily found a home in F&SF‘s pages in the ’50s—not fantasy, but not something to think seriously about.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Some of Norton’s work has fallen into the public domain, but “Mousetrap” has not. You can find it in The Many Worlds of Andre Norton, The Book of Andre Norton (same collection, different title), Wizards’ Worlds, and The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Garyn G. Roberts). Oh, and it was included in The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume Two (ed. Frederik Pohl).

Enhancing Image

Mars has become like a wonderland for explorers, for several reasons, but a big one is we know we’re not alone in the universe. People haven’t found talking aliens exactly, but they’ve found the petrified bodies of alien creatures, “sand monsters,” that stand in the desert, encased with some details of their anatomy hidden. Only problem is taking one of these monsters to some research center. The monsters, “which can withstand the dust storms, the extremes of desert cold and heat, crumble away if so much as a human finger tip is poked into their ribs.” The bright side is being able to hold one of these monsters together means big money. (Bit of an aside, but I would have to go digging for an earlier usage of “Space Marines.” I’m sure this is not the first time, but mind you this was before “military SF” was even a concept.) Enter our three main characters: the narrator, Sam Levatts, and Len Collins. Sam is a local drunk, but he’s courageous, and he knows more about these monsters than the average person. Thus Operation Mousetrap, an effort to nab one of these monsters, is underway.

Some days ago by and the expedition Sam and Len go on doesn’t turn out well. Sam shows the narrator a picture he had taken of one particular sand monster: what appears to be a humanoid woman, with wings. Is she is a human mutant or some humanoid alien we don’t know about? Impossible to tell, but the narrator admits she’s lovely; unfortunately she’s also dust now. Len, in an effort to secure the winged woman, had destroyed her. This is important to remember, since does set up a certain action Sam takes at the story’s end. It also raises a question: Where do these monsters come from? They seem to be of different species, possibly not native to Mars, yet you can barely find anything in the desert, let along a secret civilization of humanoid aliens. Norton implies a lot while saying little. As the narrator says, “the desert dry lands haven’t been one quarter explored,” and similarly “Mousetrap” is a very short (I would say 3,000 words or less) story leaves much territory unexplored. This is not necessarily a bad thing: while the narrative of the narrator and the explorers is self-contained, with a neat twist ending, the setting is vast. There’s not much worldbuilding you can cram into such a small space, but Norton manages.

Something else that stuck out to me was Norton’s style, which struck me as overtly masculine—with a little twist or two in there. Boucher and McComas are upfront in their introduction in calling Norton a woman, which is important because this was still early in her career and people were still prone to thinking “Andre” was a man. I forget if it was a review the came out the same year as “Mousetrap” or a year later, but P. Schuyler Miller, in writing about one of Norton’s anthologies, apologizes for having misgendered her previously. What a nice guy. Still, this is a deeply masculine narrative: there aren’t any female characters with lines, and as the narrator points out, the few women who have come to Mars tend to not be much to look at. Yet the female monster Sam is obsessed with is practically deified, and perhaps more tellingly, her femininity is deified, her body sporting “the distinctly graceful curves we have come to associate with the stronger half of the race.” In old literautre I’m so used to women being called the “fairer” or “weaker” sex that I had to reread this passage to make sure I got the narrator’s remark right. For the narrator it’s perhaps a moment of self-deprication, but Norton it feels like an ironic stattement.

And as we find out in the short span of this story, men do seem to be (at least in some ways) the weaker sex in Norton’s world. Sam is a drunkard, Len is a manipulator, and the narrator is maybe a little too content to stay in his bar (the Flame Bird), away from the adventure of the desert. The winged woman, a symbol (at least for Sam) of feminine perfection, is undone by a man’s touch, and so much be avenged. The title takes on a double meaning as the petrified monsters aren’t the only things being trapped. It’s not exactly a funny story (ultimately it’s a dramatic tale of revenge), but it’s written with a biting irony Boucher and McComas would’ve liked; of anything it reminds me of a minor Henry Kuttner story.

There Be Spoilers Here

I mentioned earlier there is certainly alien life on Mars, although it doesn’t have to be humanoid or even something with limbs. Sometimes it’s just a little green lump—a blob—that looks harmless to the uninitiated. Sam knows these parts better than Len and decides to use this to his advantage. Appatently, aliens of all shapes and sizes have gone through the desert and come across these green blobs, maybe even touched them out of curiosity. The blob turns Len into “a featureless anthropoidic figure of reddish stuff,” like the winged woman in the picture, and Sam uses Len’s own gooing equipment to stabilize the petrified Len. Sam is so cold in basically killing a man that the narrator is too stupified to object—and anyway, he might get a bit of the profit. The natives of Mars, though looking harmless, have a very strange defense mechanism. I had to reread the last page or so to understand fully what happened here (it is maybe too brief for its own good), but I’d be lying if I said Norton’s “solution” to the problem of the sand monsters wasn’t inventive. The introduction’s comparison to Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” makes sense, if only because the conclusion feels like something Weinbaum would’ve imagined.

A Step Farther Out

Not much to say about this one, other than I admire Norton’s ability to imply a future world while also showing very little of it. The Mars of “Mousetrap” feels fleshed-out despite the fact that this is a one-off story that’s only half a dozen pages long. We’ll never return to this setting again, yet it seems like part of a much larger universe. It’s almost like Norton had a talent for such things, hence why she mostly wrote series.

See you next time.